From Virginia Woolf's Essay, "Modern Fiction"
(from The Common Reader, 1925)
Look within and life, it
seems, is very far from being "like this." Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind
on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of
innumerable atoms; and as
they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls differently from of
old; the moment of importance came not here but there....